The SitePoint Forums have moved.

You can now find them here.
This forum is now closed to new posts, but you can browse existing content.
You can find out more information about the move and how to open a new account (if necessary) here.
If you get stuck you can get support by emailing forums@sitepoint.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Is it only occuring on the first load after the theme change or is it persistant?

I assume the theme is being changed by switching stylesheets? How are the path to the images defined?

It doesn't really sound like a caching issue to me because if you are switching between themes, the images are going to be loaded from seperate folders and therefore the IE cache will load the stored image with the corresponding path for the current theme.

The themes are loaded into a "sites" directory with header.jpg and footer.jpg

I've noticed that if a theme has header.jpg and a new theme has a footer.jpg it works fine. If another theme gets loaded with a new header.jpg and footer.jpg it still shows the old header and footer.

The style sheet is a php file and does change the layout but the original header and footer remain the same.

Changing themes moves the header and footer to the sites directory so the page always calls header.jpg and footer.jpg so ie decides it is the same image and displays the chache version because the name has not changed. Just guessing here but iwould solve the problem. Thats why I ask.

The style changes because it has a different GET string going to it

style.php? bgcolor=ffcc00

And this works which is why I am curious if calling the header.jpg?id=random with a GET string will fix it.

Thanks, this is what I have but I dont have the problem and am stabbing in the dark on this